1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to sharing notes associated with electronic documents among users of a digital publication platform.
2. Description of the Related Art
The rapid shift to mobile Internet services is bringing content offerings to an increasingly larger number of connected devices. Experiences previously limited to a single device are now accessible across multiple devices as high volume consumer electronic platforms such as Smart Phones, tablets, eReaders, game systems, and Internet TVs have become new channels to receive digital documents and services. Popular electronic book services leverage standardized publishing formats to seamlessly integrate and synchronize digital document reading experiences across consumer devices.
But while providing excellent user reading experience for this new digital medium remains a focus of the commercially available eReading systems and applications, it has been so far much more difficult to fully integrate other related reading activities, such as note taking and sharing. The simple action of writing a note into the border of a document remains a challenging proposition for a variety of reasons in most digital reading systems. In addition, as new digital content services are progressively embedded within the original document, it becomes increasingly difficult to create, edit, and organize these additional content layers into a single reading experience. As digital documents are shifting from a static model to a connected one where related, personalized and other social content are being aggregated dynamically within the original document, it becomes strategic for publishing platforms and their distribution systems to be able to properly author and manage these new individual content layers among a plurality of users.